Where? Almhult, Sweden. Population: Approx. 10,000 (Over half of the town’s residents work for the Swedish furniture-maker and retailer.)

Approx. 170,000 people visited the museum in 2018. This year, the number’s expected to reach 200,000.

Who visits the Ikea Museum? Swedish, German, Dutch and Danish tourists. Designers and furniture enthusiasts. Company and school trips to the museum is a growing segment. The museum has a café that’s a popular lunch spot during Swedish winters.

What draws people to the museum in a village? 476 kilometers away from Stockholm, the museum’s location is not quite convenient. So what draws people there? “Ikea,” answers Jutta Viheria, who is in charge of exhibitions at Ikea Museum. “If you look at Sweden, Ikea has been here for 75 years. Very few people have had no contact with Ikea. You either like it or you don’t like it. Some have a love-hate relationship with it. But you have some kind of relationship.”

‘Look! A space ship has landed’The museum’s housed in the first Ikea store building, a structure that some locals classified as ‘alien space ship’ when it first opened in 1958.

Early practical challenges for the museum’s builders: Climate control and size of doors. The museum still doesn’t have a door large enough to bring in founder Ingvar Kamprad’s famous old Volvo that is currently on display at the Volvo museum.

The museum has permanent, temporary and touring exhibitions that cover the history of the brand and its founder, marketing and retail milestones, the evolution of homes through the ages, explorations of radical visions of future homes and small-space living. Viheria tells Brand Equity, “We want the museum to be a design destination.” But, as Ikea is for “the many people”, this space cannot be as “academic” as other museums. Currently, Ikea Museum has on-going exhibitions in partnership with the Design Museum in London and Copenhagen-based research and design lab Space10 that works on cutting-edge, sustainable living solutions for the future.

In search of selfies and the truth – The vision for Ikea Museum is to make the space in tiny Almhult an interactive platform and design destination. “We want to bring exhibitions alive,” says Viheria. She believes that social media has changed the museum experience in more ways than one. “Today museums have become destinations. Look at the Paul Smith museum in Los Angeles. People are actually travelling there just to take a selfie. The Museum of Ice Cream has 20,000 visitors a day. They come to take pictures of themselves with ice-cream.” But there’s a reason besides selfies that draws people to museums, according to Viheria. As it gets harder to distinguish between what’s real and what’s fake, Viheria believes people are seeking spaces of truth. She says, “People trust that museums will tell the truth.”

Sofa Stories: On display are home sets from different eras. Jutta Viheria says, “We also want to tell the story of Ikea, the stories of people. When people see the old room sets, they remember “Oh! When I got married we had that sofa.” And then you would like to take a picture with the sofa. Then they remember how they got married and wonder where that sofa is today. People like to share their stories. If everything goes as planned we will start working on that much more.” Other Exhibits:

Get your personalized Ikea catalogue cover. Visitors can play around in a fully furnished living room while a camera captures images. Pictures are printed on mock Ikea catalogues for people to take home.

A showcase film about Hong Kong based architect Gary Chang who converted one room (32sqm) into 24. A giant wave mattress serves as seating area.

The annual Ikea catalogue is produced in over 32 languages, with more than 210 million copies delivered to 44 countries. At the museum, a wall display shows the catalogue’s evolution over decades.

Visitors can browse through Ikea’s ad historyThe Home Futures exhibit “compares twentieth-century prototypes with the latest innovations in domestic living to question whether yesterday’s fantasies have become today’s reality.”

The many sides of Ingvar Kamprad - The permanent exhibit is focused on founder Ingvar Kamprad’s life and work. It includes his office from his home in Switzerland that was reconstructed in the museum. Shelves are packed with his books and his desk is covered with papers, folders and magazines. Every piece is from his original study, save the fly on the glass wall around the office. Kamprad’s bedside table is covered in notes and reminders he scribbled with pencil and pen.

Museum Top Tip: Most of the furniture you see you may sit on. But we recommend a quick check with museum authorities before you park yourself on a giant red, lips-shaped couch.

Testament of a Furniture Dealer

Jutta Viheria began working at Ikea in 1983 as a decorator in a Stockholm store. She recalls, “It was a different time for Ikea then, we were in just a few places and a lot of Swedes went abroad to help out in different countries.” In 1988, Viheria landed in Italy. She had planned to stay for two years but ended up staying for sixteen. After a brief stint at an Italian design company, Viheria returned to Ikea in 1996 and she has since “opened a lot of stores”. Three years ago she took on the Ikea Museum project, an assignment that turned out to be “tough and fun”. Says Viheria, “We have 420 stores. We know how stores work but we had never built a museum!” They began by asking the most important question - what is an Ikea museum? “It’s a brand museum and it’s also a corporate museum and then we are positioned in Almhult (a small town).” But the brief for Viheria and her team is clear now - tell the story of Ikea and also establish the museum as “a design destination”.

The hero of Ikea’s story is the company’s founder Ingvar Kamprad, a much-loved figure in the Ikea family who began his journey with a dream of making simple and affordable home furnishings for “the many people”. Doesn’t sound too grand, but today Ikea is one of the world’s most valuable companies. Kamprad was 91 years old when he passed away in 2018, but his legacy lives on in the company’s culture and employees.

Viheria still remembers the day she heard the news of Kamprad’s passing. When she read the text she broke down in tears, right outside one of Kamprad’s stores. A few minutes later, her previous boss called Viheria’s phone. “I was sitting at the entrance of the store and we were just crying together. I never expected it would hit me so hard.” After Kamprad’s death, people gathered at Ikea’s first store (now the museum), to pay their respects. “People from the village put flowers and candles. I remember younger colleagues just wanting to hug me. It was much more emotional than we imagined.” Something wonderful happened after the final farewell though. Viheria says, “Since then we’ve been speaking more about Ikea’s culture and values. It became more important than it was when Ingvar was alive, because he was such an iconic Ikea value carrier. When he passed away I took Ingvar’s Testament of a Furniture Dealer, which he wrote in 1976, and read it again. And I remember thinking, now I have to work in this way. What he wrote here, that’s the responsibility left for us as the Ikea family. So, I hug everybody now. Ingvar always hugged people when he met them.”